- published: 12 Apr 2016
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Geordie (/ˈdʒɔːdi/) is a regional nickname for a person from the Tyneside region of the north east of England, or the name of the English-language dialect spoken by its inhabitants. Depending on who is using it, the catchment area for the term "Geordie" can be as large as the whole of North East England, or as small as the city of Newcastle upon Tyne.
In most aspects, Geordie speech is a direct continuation and development of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon settlers of this region. They consisted of mercenaries employed by the ancient Brythons to fight the Pictish invaders after the end of Roman rule in Britannia in the 5th century; the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who thus arrived became, over time, ascendant politically and – through population transfer from tribal homelands in northern Europe – culturally over the native British. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerged during the Dark Ages spoke largely mutually-intelligible varieties of what is now called Old English, each varying somewhat in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. This Anglo-Saxon influence on Geordie can be seen today, to the extent that poems by the Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede translates more successfully into Geordie than into modern-day English. Thus, in northern England, dominated by the kingdom of Northumbria, was found a distinct "Northumbrian" Old English dialect.